![]() The outbreak of World War I, for example, left Rachel Burstein with her three children in the Ukrainian town of Kamen-Kashirski while her husband labored in America, having returned there from a prolonged visit with his family that began in 1913. Sometimes the delay in reuniting the family stretched into years, compelling women to raise their children alone and to take on the full responsibility of arranging a transoceanic voyage. Oftentimes, married men set out in advance to prepare the way economically and planned for their wives and children to join them once they were settled. ![]() Jews engaged in chain migration, in which one member of an extended family secured a place in the new country and then bought a ticket for siblings so that they could settle in America. Although immigrant Jewish males arrived in the United States with less cash than the average immigrant, they inserted themselves into the economy largely as skilled workers and peddlers, while most newcomers began their working lives in America as unskilled laborers.Įven though the mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe was a “family migration,” the process of leaving the Old World for the New often temporarily disrupted families. Others took advantage of their commercial background in the market towns and cities of Eastern Europe to become peddlers, hoping that their entrepreneurial skills would lead to prosperity. Settling primarily in the cities of the East Coast, in crowded, tenement-filled districts that were often called “ghettos,” many Jewish immigrants worked in the burgeoning garment industry, in shops often owned by descendants of an earlier immigrant wave of Central European Jews. "the written Torah." The Bible the Pentateuch Tanakh (the Pentateuch, Prophets and Hagiographia) Torah, women bore the major responsibility as breadwinners for their families. In the small number of traditional families where husbands devoted themselves to studying Torah she-bi-khetav: Lit. Women worked alongside men, supporting their families primarily through petty commerce, selling all kinds of produce in the marketplace, and also through artisan trades such as shoemaking and tailoring. ![]() Similarly, more than a third of the population in urban communities in Galicia were Jews, as were twenty percent in Romania’s provincial capitals. In the Pale as a whole, Jews constituted thirty-eight percent of those living in cities or towns, though only 12 percent of the total population. ![]() In the northwest section of Russia’s Pale of Settlement, the western provinces to which Jews were restricted, they accounted for 58 percent of the total urban population. Unlike many other migrants to America’s shores, they had not been peasants in the old country. Immigrant Jews, both female and male, arrived in America with considerable experience of urban life in a capitalist economy. ![]()
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